NATIONAL BESTSELLER Time magazine's #1 Book of the Year NOW IN PAPERBACKI TIME MAGAZINE'S # 1 NATIONAL BOOK CRITIC BOOK OF THE YEAR S CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST 111 1 \ . ... \ . \ \tt mt \ L \, e\ --'" --::1' 111\\\1'_\ . \ \,.,,,\\1:' .{\\,'l' ' Íi " T' , ,",' j ' , " /, '. f ", i I /Ä ' /: "',:t \' f /1' ! - _' ! It' ' f/, "J ,! I t f " ;A' -.:!...J,. . .. i I fI . " t : frI' jJ . .. t ,", 'I " " . . . '--.. 'fl, l- " - - \t Ii J ."'> I ""'. ..,.", A LIS ' '" ON BECHDEL by ALISON BECHDEL "A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debt to each other." -Time "A splendid autobiography... generous and intelligent." -Entertainment Weekly "Pioneering... Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work. " -New York Times Book Review A Best Book of the Year: Time, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, People, USA Today, Salon, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Village TIoice, and many others Mariner Books .marinerbooks.com 62 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007 his life produced no finished work. There is much conjecture in "Exit Ghost" about why this happened to the once famous short-story writer. Zuckerman's remark, though it comes in the form of an assertion, is in actual- ity further conjecture. The remark has no meaning in my own case. I've been stymied again and again by writing fiction-at various times stymied, frus- trated, mystified, thwarted, staggered, even outright defeated-but I haven't been grotesquely shattered as yet. By and large, writing fiction does the oppo- site-it fosters endurance. The ordeal requires the sort of fortitude that keeps one gOIng. H.L.: Has Nathan Zuckerman really exited for good? Will you miss him? Why have you kept him as a resource all these years? P.R.: Yes, I mean for him to be-in the final words of the book-"gone for good." Zuckerman became a true char- acter in my work when he was portrayed (in "The Ghost Writer"), in his early twenties, seeking to apprentice himself to the older writer E. I. Lonofl: whose austere moral stance is an enticement as great to the novice writer as are his books of ironic short stories about trou- bled Jews. "The Ghost Writer" takes place in the mid -nineteen -fifties in the New England locale where Zuckerman himself eventually comes to spend his sixties as the reclusive author of a dozen or so well-regarded novels. Between the first book, "The Ghost Writer," and the last, "Exi t Ghost," there are seven very different books, charting Zuckerman's adventures as a writer in the U.S. (in "Zuckerman Unbound" and "The Anat- omy Lesson"), in Czechoslovakia (in "The Prague Orgy"), in the U.K. and Is- rael (in "The Counterlife"), and, finally- with the American trilogy ("American P I " " I M . d C ." astora , arrie a ommunIst, and "The Human Stain")-back in the U.S. Zuckerman narrates these last three books from his mountaintop cabin, eight miles away from Athena College, where E. I. Lonoff was a renowned fac- ulty member when they first met. He has come full circle geographically, and with the experience of aging and illness is, in the American trilogy, no longer a strong actor in the drama of his own life but someone removed from all turbu- lence, from all his deeds and misdeeds and the distraction of the pursuit of happiness-the depicter, rather, of other lives, whose personal trials and historic travails come to possess his imagination entirely and feed on the strength of his mental energy. In the stories of Swede Levov, of Ira and Murray Ringold, of Coleman Silk, Zuckerman's is the mediating intelli- gence, the mind that shapes the tale. Ira Ringold, the hero of "I Married a Com- munist," is the dark analogue of Swede Levov, the hero of "American Pastoral." Ira: the man totally misplaced in society, a bristling, angry Jew, a defiant Ameri- can, an exuberant social force with a ter- rible secret. The Swede: a natural, the man at ease here, a Jew wholly at peace as a satisfied American citizen, a man with no secrets at all. Ira: who rushes to radically alter history, society, the class system. The Swede: who, like most other men, endeavors to secure for him- self a life beyond the reach of history's sweep, bound to and by a business, a family, and the greater society's shared ideals. Ira: the revolutionary spirit un- done by the maddening incursion into his historical struggle of marital and household mayhem. The Swede: the private man, ahistorical, compliant, ut- terly content, crushed by the incursion into his home of the history that isn't quite yet history-destroyed by the present American moment. Coleman Silk is history's rather different play- thing and a third type of hero alto- gether. The history he wishes radically to alter is not society's but simply his own. And he succeeds brilliantly: springs the historical lock of his own destiny, boldly remakes his social being, only to be blindsided by the current mood, by the mind of the country, by the history that is inescapable-the history that is , . one s own tIme. The summary condensed above- some of whose sentences I've plucked from a preface I wrote to a limited edi- tion of "The Human Stain"-constitutes the best answer I can think to give to your question 'Why have you kept him as a resource all these years?" In the begin- ning, Zuckerman gave me Zuckerman; later he gave me the Ringolds, the Swede, and Coleman Silk. Will I miss him? No. I'm curious to see who and what will re- place him. .